Can Democrats Reverse America's Decline?
Can Democrats Reverse America's Decline?
Joe Biden has stabilized America from the worst of Trump's excesses, but our nation is still losing the fight to protect human dignity.
It’s fair to worry that everything is going wrong.
I mean, who would blame you? For much of the past two decades our nation and our world have careened from barely-contained financial contagion in 2008 to the unexpected resurgence of right-wing authoritarianism after 2016, to a sprawling viral pandemic that worsened existing ideological rifts while creating entirely new ones.
2023 alone has been an exhausting march through unbelievable headlines, and we’re not even halfway into March yet. We’ve witnessed the mounting barbarism of Russia’s illegal invasion of Ukraine, seen America accosted by a flotilla of ominous balloons, toasted marshmallows over the accelerating collapse of the crypto markets, and seem to have circled fully around to financial panics, ethically suspect bank CEOs and faltering financial institutions. What year is it?
It’s Not Just the Economy, Stupid
There has always been a rarefied rump of Beltway pundits and well-to-do liberals who earnestly believed Joe Biden’s victory in 2020 would mark a great American reset. That tossing Trump and his cronies out of their bunker under 1600 Pennsylvania Ave. would give the good guys a free hand to roll back the worst Trumpian excesses. Hell, maybe they could even restore public faith in government and fill in that giant crater where trust in the media once existed.
The optimism-at-all-costs set leans on a familiar set of metrics to declare America’s major problems solved. Twitter has been awash in slickly-produced graphics like the one below, touting the 12.4 million jobs the Biden administration has so far added to the economy. And that’s true: with 311,000 more jobs added last month, Biden is certainly on pace for some of the fastest job growth in modern American history.
But booming job growth hides the knottier problems our post-authoritarian president must unravel. On basic questions of equity and human dignity, the clock seems to be moving backwards. After half a century, the Supreme Court stripped women of their fundamental reproductive freedom. Now over a dozen states are actively drafting legislation that would criminalize not only abortion, but in some cases IVF and contraception as well. In Red America, conservative legislatures have normalized insane state laws empowering bounty hunters to identify, harass and sue women who obtain abortions and the doctors who provide them.
As our stock market brings in strong quarterly profits for shareholders, gay and lesbian Americans face the very real risk that the Supreme Court decision that legalizes their marriages could soon be overturned. They face the real terror that, no matter how legally sound or morally compelling their argument, it will not be enough for a Supreme Court that seems to value settling old Republican scores above any adherence to the rule of law.
The Republican War on Transgender Humanity
We live in an era of growing, yet sharply unequal, economic prosperity that coexists at a time of rising social intolerance and illiberalism. The Republican Party has presided over the mainstreaming of a Pandora’s Box of harmful social developments, most notably in their all-out campaign to vilify and dehumanize transgender children.
Republicans’ sadistic effort to terrorize trans children is masked as a campaign to “protect kids” like the imaginary 15-year-old girl South Carolina Rep. Nancy Mace says is at risk of having her “breasts chopped off” due to overzealous ‘woke’ doctors. In reality, lawmakers like Mace are wrong on the ethics and wrong on the science — not only can minors not even begin the gender-affirming care process without parental consent, they are restricted from access to hormone therapy or transition surgery until adulthood. But in framing the language of transgender medical care in barbaric terms as somehow non-medical, Mace and her conservative allies hope to frighten Americans into viewing marginalized children as their leading enemy in the social justice wars.
One need only look at the mainstreaming of anti-trans hate to see just how quickly Republican rhetoric has reached for violent comparisons. At CPAC earlier this month, Daily Wire ghoul called for “transgenderism” to be “eradicated for the good of society.” This idea, not only that transgender Americans have no place in American public life but hat they must be completely destroyed as a first step to restoring Republicans’ fever dream of nostalgic American greatness, is now a litmus test for any Republican who aspires to federal office in the future.
All of this has real consequences. Earlier this week, a transgender Twitter user who goes by the name Eden posted a suicide note on the platform. It tells the story of someone struggling to live their identity in a conservative Muslim family, trying and failing to hide their hormone replacement therapy from disapproving family members. Among a million small indignities and injustices, it reads:
After the first time they found my HRT, it was traumatizing, but I didn’t want to stop. I didn’t want to live if I couldn’t transition. Then the second time came. After that, I took a month break off of HRT, and got back on it. They have found my HRT again, and I am done fighting.
It’s difficult to celebrate booming job numbers and America’s restored international reputation when every day is marked with preventable deaths that find their roots in the intolerance and hate so gleefully amplified by every major conservative media outlet and every single 2024 Republican presidential hopeful.
This week brings an often overlooked anniversary. On March 18, 1968, then-presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy gave a speech at the University of Kansas. Its topics ranged from the Vietnam war to the American economy to poverty in the rural South, but it also included an idea that is fundamental to modern progressivism. Kennedy said:
The gross national product does not allow for the health of our children, the quality of their education or the joy of their play. It does not include the beauty of our poetry or the strength of our marriages, the intelligence of our public debate or the integrity of our public officials.
It measures neither our wit nor our courage, neither our wisdom nor our learning, neither our compassion nor our devotion to our country, it measures everything in short, except that which makes life worthwhile. And it can tell us everything about America except why we are proud that we are Americans.
Sadly, more than half a century later our country has made little progress balancing its economic successes with the widespread poverty and intolerance that rots our nation from within.
The Beltway Democratic set would say that Biden’s presidency is certainly better than a second term of Donald Trump, that we should be grateful, that things could be worse. That’s true. But Kennedy’s criticism still echoes from 1968: yeah, things could be worse. But when will our elected leaders — those who promised us change — dedicate themselves to the hard and politically costly work of making our worst problems better?
Democracy is A Fight Worth Having
A fresh and optimistic post-Trump era was always a fantasy. The relentless pace at which Trump took to sledgehammering the pillars of American democracy made sure of that. But it was a fantasy a lot of exhausted and morally beaten down Americans were willing to believe in if it meant even the chance at turning a corner from the fascist extremism of the MAGA movement.
Of course, there is incalculable value simply in removing Trump from power. That was the critical first step in any effort — by Democrats, anti-Trump Republicans, or anyone else — towards marginalizing the MAGA movement and its antidemocratic core values. But simply removing the movement’s leader has done little to dampen the broader MAGA movement. If anything, a weakened Trump has filled many MAGA hardliners with the hope that they can now transplant their poison vine into fresh soil, perhaps in the form of a right-wing leader less visibly unstable than the former president.
Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis seems to fit that bill, even if he’s still running well behind Trump in national polls. The rest of the 2024 Republican roster is an afterthought, an also-ran list of washed-up centrists with no clear constituencies (read: Pence, Haley, Sununu) or MAGA second-stringers like former Secretary of State Mike Pompeo or Texas Senator Ted Cruz, both of whom lack the charisma and burn-it-all-down credibility to seriously challenge Trump for leadership of the MAGA horde.
President Joe Biden deserves great credit for the efforts he’s made to successfully put the United States back on track — and I’ve been quick to praise him, even comparing his first term to Franklin D. Roosevelt’s transformative presidency in a previous column. But the decision by Democrats to “sit out” social issues in 2024 in hopes of wooing the center-right and disaffected independents back to the Biden fold is a catastrophic mistake.
Making an “economy only” argument in 2024 brushes aside the most challenging conflicts in our democracy today, conflicts which deserve serious national discussion and the full-throated advocacy of Democratic lawmakers. These are core issues Democrats promised Americans they would take at least attempt to address if voters honored Biden with an elevation to the presidency. For many Americans, they are actual issues of life and death. The American people deserve a Democratic Party willing to stand and fight for the dignity and humanity and equal justice of all people. It is never too late to recommit to that fight.